Page 26 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 13

vaara 1985, 1997; Scollon 1985; Scollon & Scollon 1981; Tannen 1985). Sifianou’s
(1997) comment is representative:
[...] the length of ‘gaps,’ types of fillers and amount of the overlapping talk are cul-
ture-specific. In some societies, gaps and silences are preferred to what is consid-
ered to be ‘idle chatter.’ In others, such idle chatter is positively termed as ‘phatic
communion,’ [...] (p. 75)

For example, in their discussion of the stereotypical image of ‘the silent Finn’,
Lehtonen & Sajavaara (1985) suggest that Finns use long silent pauses in their talk
compared to Southern Europeans or Anglo-Americans. Similarly, Scollon & Scol-
lon (1981) and Scollon (1985) claim that Anglo-American English speakers of-
ten dominate conversations with Athabaskan Indian people because of the longer
switching pauses of Athabaskan people. Thus, from Anglo-American perspectives,
their communication with the Athabaskan people is perceived as a failure, as sug-
gested by the title of Scollon’s (1985) paper, “The machine stops.” On the other
hand, from the Athabaskan point of view, Anglo-Americans talk too much and
are rude (Scollon & Scollon 1981: 36). A similar contrast can be found in Eades’
work on courtroom interaction involving Aboriginal witnesses in Australia. Eades
advised Anglo-Australian lawyers to “use silence between answers and following
questions” (1992: 41) in order to take into consideration the fact that “Aboriginal
people often like to use some silence in their conversation, and they do not take it
as an indication that communication has broken down” (Eades 2000: 172).
However, as already mentioned, Tannen’s (1985) study suggests that even
within white American culture, there may be different orientations to silence
and talk: the fast-speaking New Yorkers perceived the slower Californian speak-
ers as being “withholding, uncooperative, and not forthcoming with conversa-
tional contributions” while the slow speakers’ perceived the faster speakers to be
“dominating” (p. 108). Moreover, as is the case of Lehtonen & Sajavaara (1985),
observations on length of pause are often based on “[C]omparison of the intuitive
data” (p. 194), and in their case, the frequency of pauses and the rate of speech
in the Finnish sample group do not show differences from those of other cultural
groups. One empirically strong study of tolerance for silence is that of Jefferson’s
(1989) on the length of silent pauses which native speakers of English tolerate. She
found that native speakers of English seem to tolerate up to around 1.0 second
of silent pause. Except for this study, however, there do not seem to be any large
scale empirical studies on tolerable length of silent pauses in different cultures.
Although his assumption is not based on a large set of data as in Jefferson (1989),
Watts (1997) also claims that “at least within Western European and North Amer-
ican white culture” (p. 93) a silence of between 1.3 to 1.7 seconds and above will
be significant and “open for interpretation” (p. 94). However, it should also be